Friday, October 7, 2011from TalentRooster

Mike Grennier, who is in charge of corporate recruiting for Wal-Mart spoke last week at the HR tech conference in Las Vegas. Following are some excerpts from his talk.

First, let's start with Mike's great session on how Wal-Mart has been able to reduce the cost and time associated with first round interviews by using video interview technology. I liked this session not only for the cool things Wal-Mart is doing with video technology to overhaul their interview process but also for Mike's engaging and persuasive presentation on why video interviewing makes sense for organizations.

Here are the pearls of wisdom from this session:

- The reason for video technology is twofold: 1) You save $ in screening candidates with a first round interview (flights, hotels, cabs, etc.) 2) Saves hiring managers time as they can screen candidates on their own schedule.

- Video technology should replace the first round interview in your interview process. It is NOT a substitute for final interviews.

- By using video technology, Wal-Mart has saved an estimated cost of $2.2 million in 2011 and $3.1 million in 2012. Any time you can save over $5 million in two years, you're doing something right!

- Hiring Manager adoption for this is very high. In a recorded interview with a hiring manager, she asked them to please not take this tool away from them. I've seen this type of buy-in from hiring managers only a handful of times in the HR Technology space. Very powerful stuff!

- For candidates that don't have webcams (this # is decreasing rapidly), Wal-Mart ships out free webcams that are company branded. Not only is this a nice touch with their employer brand but it helps provide candidates with instructions on how to use webcam so interviews go smoothly.

- Cost and time savings are the most important benefits but another result of more video